As a community of tech lovers and early adopters, who can relate?:
You discover a new app and you’re thrilled. It sounds like it fits your needs exactly. You download it, register, and after two weeks of push notifications overwhelming your screen, you turn them off. Your usage falls along with your hopes of how it could help. Repeat for cluttered inboxes and unsubscribes.
In many cases, it’s not that you have a bad app on your hands — it’s the notifications. They’re annoying and even stress-inducing.
Yesterday, Courier launched on Product Hunt. In his introduction, founder Troy Goode brought up that episode of The Office where pseudo-entrepreneur Ryan Howard introduced his latest venture, WUPHF.
“Being plugged into every provider is the correct next step, but where they got it jokingly wrong was sending it to every provider at the same time.”
Courier is an API plus no-code studio that enables developers to deliver the right messages at the right time. It integrates with Slack, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, MailGun, Twilio, and many more for quick automation workflows.
Courier’s launch follows a $10.1M Series A closed in September. Goode is ex-Eloqua, a marketing automation company acquired by Oracle, which is where he became frustrated by how many different tools teams were using to communicate with prospects and customers.
Although large companies often end up building their own communications infrastructure in-house, Courier hopes to provide a solution for smaller teams, and for larger ones who don’t feel the need to re-invent the wheel.
On the consumer side, Courier’s concerned with user preferences as well.
“Courier makes it easy for developers to build notifications that allow you to control whether you want to receive those notifications, when you want to receive them, and how you want them delivered.”
Goode also asked for examples of companies who do a good job or "suck extra bad" at sending notifications. See what people are saying and...
We were just talking about how podcasting continues to grow in popularity. As it turns out, co-founder and tech entrepreneur Paul English is one of the many who have become avid podcast listeners over the last year.
English just launched Moonbeam, an app that makes podcast discovery easier.
Inspired by TikTok’s popular discovery algorithm, Moonbeam presents recommendations driven by both human curation and machine learning. As goes with ML, Moonbeam’s recommendations are expected to improve the more people use the app.
- For everybody in the back: Go vote for your favorite Makers Festival - Green Earth product!
- Are you a first-time maker? Here are some tips from the community. (Makers: Don’t forget to help out first-timers and add yours or upvote your favorites).
- One big Windows announcement: Android apps are coming to Windows 11. The Microsoft Store is giving developers 100% of the revenue from app sales, which is a head-turner since Google’s fees are 30% and over 1.3 billion users are running Windows 10 now.
- It’s 2001. Click, click, click. That’s the sound of millennials on their iPod Classics scrolling to Drive by Incubus or maybe Bootylicious. Take the trip with this nostalgic iPod Classic Player.